The Warning

I think the animals will come and live among us,
their habitats ruined, their forests burned, their seas
afloat with the litter-tide of our abominations.
It comes in small ways, foretold in dreams:
       the snake I saw
amid the lettuce leaves: how does one eat
around its coiled length without disturbing it?
Is it a venomous one? — Will it take an egg
if I poise it at one end of the salad bowl,
and, swallowing it, slide off and ignore me?

Why, when I open my wardrobe door
do two fawns stagger-stumble from it,
their deer-horse voices calling, “Hide us!”?

Why do I awaken, just half the bed my own,
the other half fur-snuggle full of breathing:
a great gray wolf, red-eyed and drooling?
“No need to worry,” his bass voice assures me,
tongue lapping my hand ‘twixt double dog fangs.
“As long as I’m here, the others will spare you.”

“Others?” I ask. I sit up in bed and find
amid my clutter of chairs and Chinese, Egyptian
tchotchkes, blocking the view of Renaissance
boy, the enigma-smiling Bronzino print,
a diorama of wild animals on the move: bear cubs,
an eagle and a fox in tug-of-war fight
over a leftover steak from the refrigerator,

dark-mask raccoon faces, opossums peeping
from under the uplifted carpet’s corner,
a raven (not stuffed, a living raven!) a-perch
my bust of Hermes. My foot, in search of slipper,
startles a whippoorwill that hoots at me.
A badger rejoins its den beneath my floorboards.

I am not their food and they are not mine,
but somehow, they will have to be provided for.
They are here for the duration, as the water rises,
the tornadoes whirl, the fracked earth shivers.
It is hard to look into their eyes without shame.